Human Survival

...Will any candidate have enough faith in American intelligence to be frank in putting the issues of national survival in the forefront of the campaign...

...To do this he urges that the United States move its attacking bases to the oceans, using submarines and future Polaris missiles along with atomic-powered seaplane bombers...

...These five books deal with the problems of human survival posed by the threat of thermonuclear war and the joint conviction in Moscow and Washington that war may be necessary in defense of national interests...

...Hughes, a former Time-Life man and an Eisenhower speech writer in 1952 and 1956, has dared to think beyond the cliches he contributed to those campaigns...

...He begins with an assumption which he does not question, that the Soviet Union is determined to risk war to dominate the world and has only been restrained by the threat of American power...

...A Britisher, Wayland Young, in Strategy for Survival would neutralize the whole world outside of the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Harper...

...Beyond Survival was written by a Time editor at the request of Henry Luce, who wanted a review of American foreign policy...

...Strategy for Survival, by Way-land Young...

...Morgenstern's proposal would go far to neutralize mainland United States as a military center...

...Random House...

...This record horrified civilized men at the time...

...Given the sense of urgency felt by all these writers, the 1960 campaign may well be America's last chance to face the truth of the nation's position and to act politically...

...3.95...

...306 pp...

...Progress in such a plan, Young hopes, would encourage American and Russian nuclear disarmament under the United Nations...

...Reviewed by William L. Neumann Nazi Germany set a historical record for mass killings with some five million Jews and anti-Nazis plus more than twenty million Russians who died of bullets, bombs, starvation, and cold...

...3.95...

...Beyond Survival, by Max Ways...

...Disarmament Commission and the majority of members agreed that it is "desirable" eventually to have China in the U.N...

...306 pp...

...The Question of National Defense, by Oskar Morgenstern...

...94 pp...

...Young is a proponent of the non-nuclear club, including China, as the first step towards disarmament...

...Peace-loving nations," "free world," "massive retaliation," and "liberation" are all dissected to show the shabbiness of these glittering words in practice...

...There is much more of the same for those who find this framework consoling...

...Even though the survival of the bulk of the national population is jeopardized by war, Morgenstern has little hope for political efforts, based on moral or religious considerations, to prevent war...

...Fallout shelters for people outside the blast area are a practical possibility, but a crash program of construction would be dangerous, Morgenstern believes, by giving the impression that the United States was preparing to take the initiative in attacking...

...This hidden, virtually indestructible retaliatory force would, he hopes, make war self-defeating...

...Oskar Morgenstern in The Question of National Defense, as a specialist in games theory, attempts to work out a strategy for the United States...

...He writes off efforts to protect the urban population as being practically nil...

...Or, as Morgenstern and Hughes suggest, has well padded escapism become a national mania so that the only politically "safe" issues are those which gloss over the real threat to America and to civilization itself...

...Indeed, the only defect about them from the moral side—and it is a serious defect—is that we did not appreciate how right they were...

...Within this framework Morgenstern bluntly presents the facts of America's defenselessness...

...Penguin...

...250 pp...

...The way offered is to make war technologically impossible by assuring the self-destruction of the nation which begins it...

...Their policy recommendations urge further effort on the part of the U.N...

...Emmet Hughes' America the Vincible is, by contrast, a superb volume...

...Only a return to diplomacy, to direct negotiations which face up to American weaknesses and use American strength, can save the republic...

...The result is something which is at times profound and consistently effective in exposing the poverty of the Acheson-Dulles approach to the international world...

...In regard to the major American postwar decisions, "These acts were not wrong...

...Each nation would ban bomber or missile bases on their soil and rely on conventional weapons for their defense...

...The ordinary American, faced with the stark facts, can be expected to do little more than curse governments and science and then to turn to the television screen to put his mind at rest...

...As Robert Oppenheimer recently asked, "What are we to think of such a civilization which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretic terms...

...The United States must begin to seek its way by banning smug proclamations, "Truman doctrines," "Eisenhower doctrines," and self-righteous poses...

...It is based on the assumption that John Foster Dulles was a great Secretary of State...

...Today in high places in Washington men talk in technical terms of the sacrifice of fifty million, a hundred million or even a hundred and fifty million of their fellow countrymen while they expect to kill an even larger number of Russians...

...The group of Americans who make up the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace are far more conservative in their approach...

...He believes any effective shelter program for cities against blast destruction would require an effort and expenditure too great for this country to undertake...

...With a writer's concern for words Hughes analyzes the perversion of meaning in the rhetoric used in support of American policy...

...75 cents...

...Doubleday...